Westerns
Story Stream
America’s Endless Horizons August 26, 2024
The first installment of Kevin Costner’s Western film series Horizon: An American Saga is an homage to America’s ceaseless drive and energy. Before the Civil War, in the opening scene, settlers of men, women and children encamped on an Arizona river...
Equality Is Good, Actually August 14, 2024
Once upon a time in a distant land of kings and priests, a collection of materialist philosophers decided to destroy Western civilization. These philosophers ripped apart the customs of the past and replaced them with sad irreligious notions of right...
Phantasms & Fascists August 08, 2024
Judith Butler pioneered new approaches to the study of gender, interrogating the relationship between concepts of gender and the social construction of hierarchical relationships and sexual stereotypes in ways that have both enraged and inspired. Gen...
America’s Last Great Political Novel August 07, 2024
America has produced plenty of high-quality political novels. Few American mystery novelists have ever investigated a real-life murder, and few contemporary Western novelists have ever participated in a cattle drive. But plenty of political professio...
The Season of Lost Souls July 23, 2024
I’M NOT THE FIRST to say it, nor will I be the last: Irish writers are kicking arse, forging narratives for our fraught and fevered moment, spinning tensions between English and their Indigenous tongue into gold. Consider the gems from this past deca...
The Wayward Conservative Fantasies of Kevin Costner July 23, 2024
The contradiction of Kevin Costner is that he’s a congenitally laid-back actor who’s at his most compelling when portraying characters in the throes of some deep, soul-shaking compulsion. Think of JFK’s crusading district attorney, Jim Garrison, who ...
The Hidden Marriage Market July 15, 2024
“Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.”This is a quote from Bryan Cap...
From ‘Unforgiven’ to the ‘Horizon’ July 09, 2024
Look, I’m not going to lie: My favorite Fourth of July movie is Independence Day, the schlocky sci-fi actioner about America using its military and technological might to exit the post-Berlin Wall, pre-9/11 vacation from history, unite the world, and...
Kierkegaard on the Mississippi July 08, 2024
KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. ...
I (Barely) Survived ‘Horizon’ July 05, 2024
It’s been 550 days since a new episode of “Yellowstone” aired, which seems absurd for one of the most popular shows on television. But the behind-the-scenes drama since has been as fraught as the dynamics of the Dutton family, leading to the expulsio...
Kevin Costner’s News-Adjacent Ambitions July 05, 2024
Kevin Costner’s $100 million, three-hour Western Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One has flopped. Yet there are parallel ventures on the Fox Nation subscription service — Who Is Kevin Costner? And Yellowstone 150 — that persist in promoting the le...
The War for Western Civilization July 04, 2024
America’s elite universities are at war with Western civilization. And the public is finally starting to notice.Claudine Gay, the archetype of the modern university professor and administrator, was forced to resign as president of Harvard after she f...
Why Liberals Lose July 03, 2024
Since 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron has been the de facto leader of the Western liberal democracies. By comparison, Trump is too nationalist, Biden too old, British politics have been too turbulent, Trudeau is too vapid, and Scholz too pliab...
A Great Film that Reminds Us Why the Western Died July 03, 2024
Kevin Costner returns to the genre that won him his Best Director and Best Picture Oscars (1991, Dances with Wolves) with an insanely ambitious passion project in which he directs, produces, and stars—and into which he poured $50 million of his own m...
I’m Not Ready to Give Up on Kevin Costner’s 'Horizon' July 03, 2024
You have to respect Kevin Costner’s loyalty to the old-fashioned western. Since the earliest days of his career in Hollywood, the actor and director has done well by the genre (Silverado, Wyatt Earp, Open Range), and the genre has done well by him in...
Kevin Costner’s “Horizon” Goes West but Gets Nowhere July 01, 2024
Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, wi...
The 6 Laws of Dying Hollywood Franchises June 05, 2024
Back in 1958, the world was hurtling into the future at a rapid pace.The US launched its first space satellite. IBM released its 7070 computer (which weighed a paltry 23,150 pounds). And Texas Instruments built the first integrated circuit in the his...
A Veteran Teacher’s Audacious Plan for Staving Off American Decline June 03, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book LESSONS IN LIBERTY: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) by Jeremy S. Adams Decades and centuries in the future, historians will look back at our pecu...
